Free Verse and Other Stories

By Dario Ciriello

Six Science Fiction stories that take the reader from the very edge of our own universe to the dizzying depths of parallel worlds and alternate realities. This dazzling collection from noted Panverse anthology editor Dario Ciriello includes both hard and humorous SF, and novelette-length work. Recommended!

FREE VERSE: When whole bundles of worldlines—parallel realities—begin to collapse and die, an old linewalker is the only one who can help—if he can conquer his own demons.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE:An artist working on a docked luxury star-yacht is taken captive when the ship is hijacked by pirates, and has only hours to save himself before losing everything to the inflexible laws of spacetime.
TIGGER WALKS THE PLANCK: An AI trapped in a cloned feline body finds itself the unfortunate subject of an all-too-real Shrödinger's Cat experiment.
DWELL ON HER GRACIOUSNESS: At the edge of the universe in a tiny, experimental ship, a priestess from the Far Sisters cult sent to observe an impossible phenomenon faces madness and terror.
SKIFFY SUPRÈME: So just how DO you bake a planet?
DANCING BY NUMBERS: Lyra discovers an ability that can change worlds—and then makes a terrifying choice that will change them further still.

(Ebook total 31,000 words, equivalent to 90-100 pages of print).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Panverse Publishing LLC
• Release date: Jun 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940581835

Dario Ciriello

Like most writers, Dario Ciriello has lived several lives in one and enjoyed an eccentric career trajectory. He’s worked in a warehouse, driven trucks, drag raced motorcycles, had a small import business, and enjoyed a twenty-five year career as a decorative painter.Today, Dario is a professional author and freelance editor, as well as the founder of Panverse Publishing.His first novel, "Sutherland's Rules", a crime caper/thriller with a shimmer of the fantastic, was published in 2013. "Free Verse and Other Stories", a collection of Dario's short Science Fiction work, was released in June 2014. His new novel, a supernatural suspense thriller titled "Black Easter", will be released on December 5, 2015.Dario has also edited and copyedited over a dozen novels, as well as three critically-acclaimed SF novella anthologies "(Panverse One", "Panverse Two", and "Panverse Three").Dario's nonfiction book, "Aegean Dream", the bittersweet memoir of a year spent on the small Greek island of Skópelos (the real "Mamma Mia!" island), was a UK travel bestseller in 2012 and has recently been published in Poland.He lives with his wife in the Los Angeles Area.

Book preview

FREE VERSE

and other stories

Dario Ciriello

Panverse Publishing LLC

CONTENTS

FREE VERSE

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

TIGGER WALKS THE PLANCK

DWELL ON HER GRACIOUSNESS

SKIFFY SUPRÈME

DANCING BY NUMBERS

About the Author

About Panverse Publishing

FREE VERSE

and other stories

copyright © 2014 by Dario Ciriello

All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form whatsoever.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events in this book either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, or persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cover by Janice Hardy

Published by Panverse Publishing LLC at Smashwords

Visit Panverse Publishing online at www.panversepublishing.com

ISBN 978-1-940581-83-5

FREE VERSE

Dario Ciriello

ELEVEN

N outlier. Bright day. Sun in my eyes.

An urban park, overgrown with weeds, hollow-eyed buildings beyond a row of vine-strangled trees and a rotten fence. Stink of sulfur compounds and hydrocarbons.

I hurt. Rest would be good. Just an old linewalker slightly off mainhuman, let me rest.

I remember what I have to do. Not far now.

Go. . .

ONE

The line assembles around me. Rooftop; beyond the parapet, huge expanse of grey water under lowering skies. The estuary, perhaps, of some great river. Snap! and out into the between.

Another: rocky moorland, all grey stone and stunted trees; startled grazers take flight at my sudden appearance.

Snap! and again: snow this time, deep and dry, and pandemonium as a number of speeding forms flash past, and out, out, quick! before—

Snap! through the between, myself flashing likewise past worldlines thick as trees in a forest. Crazy game, snap-shifting without augs; no vectoring, no loc flags, just linewalker senses. Get myself killed! But I’m laughing as the next line forms around me.

Immediately, I know it’s bad. Sense of danger spikes, shaky high evaporates. Ought to know better than to do this for fun.

In the eaves of a wood. Gentle light, long shadows. Away before me, a hamlet deep in a broad valley, peaceful-looking. The ground, though, trembles, and there’s that sharp smell of ozone. Termie line.

Come faint shouts from the hamlet. A figure lurches from the trees to my right. A young woman, leaning heavily on a stick. Her clothes are rags, her feet bare. Hair like rust, barely lighter than my own; a face pale as milk. For a second --

A searing flood of yellow light, like someone moved the sun closer without asking, and the air crackles. The girl screams, covers her eyes.

Cursing, I turn on my augs.

I run towards her, alphanumerics and vector data splashing across my Sight. Seize her arm, as a great boom! shakes the world. Her eyes fix on me, discs of terror. "It’s all right!" I shout over the echoes. She jerks her arm free. She’s strong. Fast, too—she swings the stick before I can react, and pain explodes in my ribcage.

Twisting, I grab her again, and she stumbles. I’m reaching for the hypo with my other hand as we go down together. The impact sends a wave of sick hurt into my side, but I connect the hypo and her tricep, hold her down on the trembling earth.

The light is gone, and the sky pulses steel and bile. I haul myself upright, holding the unconscious girl’s wrist. Deep breath—hurts!—and I load a vector sequence. As the terminal dissolves around me, I wonder for the millionth time at life’s tenacity.

TWO

Back at the Bureau, still rattled and dazed, I make my way to the Big Room. Beyond the one-eighty panoramic window, the Gulf sparkles sapphire in the noon sun. A few techs at their stations, quiet, focused silhouettes surrounded by splashes of colour from their displays.

Dela’s at her console. She runs Bureau ops. Like me, she’s from a region somewhat downslope from the flat bit of the humanoid curve. She’s short, hairy, and tough as they come. We mostly get on well.

Dela looks up as I approach. Pol Ferrikkin. About time you put in an appearance.

It’s always trouble when she uses my patronymic. I attempt a breezy greeting; she sees right through it. You look like hell, she says. Her face has hardened. Can’t leave it alone, can you?

I think of the red-haired girl I just dropped off on a primary worldline of her native bundle. I aug-sensed the new secondary calve off the parent line as the panverse suppled to accommodate her, smoothly recalibrating itself to avoid paradox and recursiveness. The girl would put the line crash down to a bad dream. But on the secondary, her life was about to get a whole lot better.

But Dela sees only sunken eyes, and neck scales dulled from a day and night of surfing worldlines and bouncing off the walls of the panverse.

Who am I kidding? The girl was just coincidence, the rescue only collateral fortune.

Dela grabs my arm and gets right in my face. Her voice is a rake through gravel. Damn you, Pol! You think I can’t tell when you’ve been surfing lines for fun? One thing, killing your fool self, but I won’t let you endanger the whole Bureau. You’re not field ops anymore, but you spend more time out there than here, where you’re actually useful! You’re suspended, effective as soon as this mess is over. Right now I need you. Clear?

Small reprieve, that. I try to look contrite. What’s going on?

Oh, just worldlines dying.

Some part of me is still high: I try for levity. What else is new?

Listen, you fool! she snarls. "I’m not talking about termies just going out with a sigh. This is bad—Beltram bad, alright?" She yanks on my arm for emphasis. I yelp as pain lances my side.

Sorry. Cracked rib.

Dela’s eyes are slits. She mutters something about cracking my stupid head. Comms a tech to bring a pain patch, then twists me around to face her synch display. She cycles data, grim-faced. Any effervescence left in me is quickly going flat.

A bundle of worldlines under Bureau survey has gone unstable. A growing swath of them, secondaries through to n, spattered with a yellow-coded snow of instability, all the way back to the primary line. Several lines showing as dashed red, which means collapse.

Like the day. Like the day when Beltram’s insane experiment out in the D region canned my youthful dreams of lessening the panverse’s incalculable quota of misery and hollowed out my soul.

Billions—billions—of lives lost.

And now…

Whole worldlines gone, wiped. Now, in realtime. The walls close in as my manic mood flips.

Crashed lines could start ripples spreading throughout the bundle. The nightmare scenario: an entire bundle of worldlines whipsawing with instability until it crashes; disturbances spreading into adjacent bundles, setting up resonances that threaten whole regions…

And while theory suggests that the panverse will eventually dampen out the ripples from a local event, the safety threshold remains unknown. In the context of a practically infinite panverse, eventually is a frightening qualifier.

The tech arrives with the patch, and I smooth it onto the inside of my wrist.

Tell me we didn’t start this, I croak.

She shakes her head. We have three researchers on a termie in the region but it didn’t begin there. Causal locus unknown. I’ve run cross-correlations through all the adjacents out to the primary line of that bundle. Nothing. Unless, she adds, with an upward glance, "they’re up to something we don’t know about."

My already queasy stomach flips. She means Core, the single realm beyond the Inner Orders; and in Core, at the heart of everything, like spiders in a web, the Elect.

They…no! My voice is strange, detached. I’m hearing Beltram again. Destiny or free will, hmm? What say you, Pol, m’lad?

We have to tell Core, Dela.

I did. No reply. And we need to get those researchers out before that line goes. You’re the only walker I’ve got right now.

I nod. The Bureau employs a lot of researchers, but linewalkers are scarce. Most of those who percolate up here, to the Inner Orders, do so accidentally, by native Talent: but only a linewalker can move consciously across worlds.

The line with our people on it, a terminal a little outside the unstable yellow zone on Dela’s display, is highlighted; I reach out with my augs and start snagging the coordinates and keys, along with the tags for the researchers’ locator flags. Sytra, or Sytralaya’aarana, and two others I don’t know, Chama and Nikkoli.

But the location…! That region’s way down on the flange of the humanoid curve. They could have four eyes and feathers out there, and there’s no time for physio mods. Don’t scare the locals is one of the Bureau’s first rules, since nothing upsets a being like finding out that their solid world with all its history is just one reality in an ever-expanding panverse of perhaps 10^70 worldlines. But judging by the chaos on the display, the locals have far more to worry about than visiting aliens.

Dela’s display flickers,

Reviews for Free Verse and Other Stories

[dwatson2_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Paul Hatzis was tired of life in San Francisco, his wife had left him to join a cult and he feels American culture is violent and delusional. Paul is in search of a simpler life and has decided to go to the Greek island of Vóunos to find it. He rents out a small old house but what he doesn’t know is that the house has a dark history.Seventy years ago master of the dark arts, Dafyd along with a seer named Magda and Klaus a delusional SS colonel practiced black magic there. They killed some of the locals and in their final ritual they made a deal with outer hell and gave up their bodies to serve 70 years in hell. In exchange for their service they will be given new bodies and become immortals on Earth and the souls of the three bodies they inhabit will spend eternity in hell.I found it hard writing a description of this book because there is so much depth to the story its hard to put into words. I guess I would have to say that Black Easter by Dario Ciriello is an intellectual horror novel. I’ve read many books that have a plot line like this but what makes this story different is how its told.As Paul’s story begins you also hear the story of Magda, Klaus and Dafyd. The story starts in the present and keeps going back to tell the story of the former owners of the house. You think this is going to be your classic good versus evil story but in the beginning it’s not. You get the impression that Dafyd and Magda aren’t evil, they are in search of knowledge. Klaus is evil but he finds redemption(sort of). Then we get to find out more about what hell is like and it’s not the kind of place you would think it is.(I would love to say more but I don’t want to give it away.)This brings me to one of the things that I liked about the book, I figured that Dario wouldn’t get into the description of hell but he does and I loved the concept behind it and hearing the rituals that the three characters used to get there. I loved the characters in the book and I liked how the Greek island itself is a character as you get into how the people on the island live and act. The best part of the book is how the characters in danger act when they are faced with the prospect of death. At this point the story does become good versus evil and you see that what was presented in the beginning wasn’t the thing that should be feared(read it you’ll understand).Black Easter is truly an excellent read that had me still thinking about it after I was done reading. If you are into horror novels that have a lot of jump scares or lots of violence(it does have violence but it’s not what drives the story) you might not like this. That being said there we’re some scenes in this book where it comes across like a haunted house story. This is a great novel that will have you pondering life’s mysteries and what evil really is. I love that some of the characters question how evil can be stronger than good but as they question themselves they find the answers that they are looking for. I would love to elaborate on that statement but it would be better if you just bought Black Easter and read it.